Intimate Wars (23 page)

The day I was to participate in an educational symposium at the Moscow Literary Society, I awoke with an intense feeling of excitement. I would make my presentation and challenge the assembled physicians and journalists to create a truly revolutionary society. During my talk I stressed what I knew to be true in the most personal and political sense: if one accepts that the exercise of free will defines what it is to be moral and fully human, then women who lack the information to make choices are destined to remain second-class citizens.

Along with translated copies of my birth control pamphlet, “Birth Control Facts and Fiction: The Choice Is Yours,” T-shirts, and magazines, I had brought seven thousand condoms with me to distribute after the presentations. When the time came to hand them out, the journalists, students, and physicians turned into a swarming mob. I was surrounded as a frenzy of hands reached out to grab the condoms, leaving me breathless and amazed.

My staff was scheduled to perform abortions and Norplant inserts at the state teaching hospital. It would be the first time Norplant had been inserted into Russian women, and the first time abortions would be performed there with state-of-the-art technology. Students, gynecology residents, and the administrative staff of the hospital hovered around the operating room tables. There were three patients in the operating room; multiple abortions were often performed at the same time, without any type of anesthesia. It was faster and more efficient that way. The women came in their own
nightgowns because there were shortages of paper supplies. They placed themselves on the table and followed orders.

The next day I had a meeting at the Russian Family Planning Association, one of the only voices calling for a reasoned and intelligent family planning program. The director, Inga Grebesheva, was famous for being the only woman deputy of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The energy of the women in that room was so strong, I urged them to take immediate action. We decided to draft an open letter to Boris Yeltsin outlining the grave conditions of women's health care and demanding economic funding for birth control and education. I asked Grebesheva if she could have it done by the next day so that leading feminists at the Feminist Roundtable where I would be speaking could sign it. She smiled and told me, “I've been writing it in my head for four years.”

When we returned to New York, Marty had a change of heart about the anger he'd felt on our trip. An enormous bouquet of flowers was waiting for me on my desk at Choices on my first day back. The card read, “Darling—you are an international star. With love and admiration, Marty.” But I'd already put Marty's dark moods and manipulations out of my mind. I was thinking about Russia.

My trip had received international support, with profiles in the
Economist
and the
London Times
detailing the work I had done there. The Russian media had celebrated my project, proudly displaying my picture on the front page of the
Moscow Times
and reporting that we had “made history” on our trip. Dr. Grebesheva told the press that “until Hoffman suddenly landed on our heads,” she had almost given up trying to improve the plight of Russian women. “It is only her enthusiasm and energy that prods me into renewing our own campaign. If Merle wants to start a Choices model clinic in Moscow, we promise to find her premises tomorrow.” Indeed,
I was considering replicating Choices there. I could offer Russian women state-of-the-art family planning and counseling, as well as high quality abortion care. Russian women needed a safe harbor, a feminist outpost. I felt I had to do it.

 

TWO YEARS LATER, with great excitement and a sense of destiny, I boarded the plane for Moscow to build Russia's first feminist medical center. I would call it Choices East. I was aware of the odds: out of thirty-three hundred American /Russian joint ventures formed in 1993 in Moscow, only three hundred were still operative the next year. The American press carried endless stories of the difficulties of doing business in Russia. Apart from the basic challenge of negotiating with people whose core philosophy was for seventy years built around hostility to free markets, I had to take up the challenge of bringing a feminist consciousness to life in a highly misogynist, authoritarian society.

I began thinking in terms of “capitalism with a conscience,” a term I coined that had been met with scorn by some American feminists. Perhaps with the enormous economic and political changes in Russia at the time, my take on capitalism would find fertile ground. At that time in Moscow there was what was called soft and hard currency; soft was the ruble, which all the Russians were paid with and used, and hard was the dollar, the franc, the pound, the deutsche mark—the money that was used by foreigners to both purchase goods and bribe officials to get what they needed. I wanted to charge the Russian women for abortions in soft money—about three rubles, equivalent to about fifteen American dollars. I would charge foreign women between $100 and $150 in hard money. The idea was to subsidize the poor women with the profits or surplus that was made from doing abortions on foreigners.

The Russians I spoke with were aghast at this idea. They wanted to have two separate services, one for foreigners and one for Russians—sort of like one for cash and insurance patients and one for Medicaid patients. This surprised me. Wasn't subsidizing the poor a core belief of Communism—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?
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Much had changed in Russia since my first exploratory visit in 1992. The rise of fascistic nationalism promoted by Vladimir Zhirinovsky had produced rampant inflation, and growing disillusionment with American capitalism due to the loss of their life savings had left much of the population anxious, frustrated, and despairing. Organized crime had grown at alarming rates, a 43 percent rise in the previous five months. Gang violence, too, was so common that the
Moscow Times
reported a rate of one bomb attack every two days, mainly carried out against bankers and businessmen as gangs battled for control of the city. I'd felt relief on my first visit to Moscow upon discovering that pornography was almost nonexistent, but now I saw it everywhere. The Russian version of
Cosmopolitan
greeted me with the question, “Would you rather have sex or chocolate?” The opening of Russian markets to all things American, like Snickers bars and McDonald's, included imports of our special brands of fundamentalist misogyny: tapes of Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart now graced Russian television. The American right-to-life movement sponsored a weekly half-hour television program, and a recent right-to-life conference in Moscow boasted five hundred attendees.

I was not surprised to learn that the attacks on me in the press began before I hit the ground. A former KGB general, one Alexander Sterligov, leader of the Russian National Assembly and an ally of Zhirinovsky, was worried
that under Yeltsin the mortality rate exceeded the birthrate for the first time since World War II. Calling my plans to set up a women's clinic in Moscow an “anti-Russian ploy,” Sterligov was quoted as saying, “We will not put up with Russians having more coffins than cradles.” Not only were women the victims of repeat unsafe abortions, now they were being made to feel guilty for having them on both religious and political grounds.

I knew not to graft my American feminist philosophy onto Russian reality. My mission was to work with the Russians on an equal basis; that way they could adapt the Choices philosophy of Patient Power to their Russian sensibilities. The philosophy could then grow organically and be replicated in other parts of the country.

And in this regard things were moving along well. In February I returned to Russia to sign the Protocol of Intent with my partners: the Moscow Clinical Center Marine Hospital and the Department of Marine Transport of the Ministry of Transport. Choices East would be built in the Moscow facility first, and then instituted in eighteen other hospitals.

I took great care in having the legal documents drawn up because the law, like everything else in Russia, seemed to change almost daily. Of particular importance was the division of control. We agreed that both the American and Russian sides would hold equal shares in the venture, sharing in both the potential success and risk of the project. Needless to say, it took many phone calls and faxes to produce the detailed legal documents necessary to form the company.

At the end of my February trip, with much fanfare and press attention, we signed the Protocol of Intent that would lead to our agreement. On my return in the summer, we would finalize and sign the formal documents. Then the real work of setting up the clinic could begin.

In June, my first working day in Moscow was to be spent at the Moscow Clinical Center Marine Hospital. I immediately noticed changes. Our cars were met at the gate by armed guards. The head of the hospital, Dr. Osipov, seemed nervous and distant, his behavior erratic at our meetings. When I questioned my Russian aides about this, they informed me that he had been involved in a business venture that had soured, and had been the victim of an attack that left him in a coma for three months. I began to feel concerned that whatever his motivations, Osipov did not seem willing to move forward on the terms we had agreed upon.

My heart turned cold when he demanded 51 percent of the company. I certainly had never agreed to this. To accomplish anything for women in Russia I needed equal control of the project. Forty-nine percent would render me powerless to control the health care Choices East provided, and would allow my Russian partners to make use of my status, name, and the investments I had arranged. They knew my motivation was not financial gain; the possibility of the clinic making a profit was minimal, and my goal was only to make it self-supporting. I caucused with my aides, who believed that this was a negotiating strategy, political theater designed to gain a controlling share, and that in the end he would sign.

I was on a deadline. I had scheduled a press conference to announce the signing of the agreement; forty international journalists planned to attend. I would have to cancel it. I gave Osipov my ultimatum: by noon the next day he would have to agree to the terms laid out in February, or the deal was off. He looked at me arrogantly and said, “If you are so concerned about saving women's lives, what's one percent to you?”

The next day at noon, I asked Osipov for his decision. His answer, “Fifty-one/forty-nine,” hit me like a body blow.
So much work undone, so many hopes dashed. I stood up, shook his hand, wished him well, and walked out of the room. Osipov's aides were amazed. If Osipov was surprised he seemed to hide it well.

The press conference was canceled, but I did give private interviews. The reporter from Izvestia was dismayed. “What will Russian women do now?” she asked me. “How long will they have to wait?” We discussed organizing a grassroots feminist movement. She cautioned me that Russian women would be difficult to mobilize on the issue of women's rights, but that if we could appeal to them to mobilize for the benefit of their children, we would have a better chance. I mused over the irony of women once again reinforcing the traditional role, being there for others and not for themselves. When they tried to be, the results were often fatal. I met with a young American woman who had been working on setting up the first battered women's shelter in Russia. The day she opened the hotline they received four hundred calls. But in the last year, two of the volunteers had been murdered by their husbands.

The visionary in me embraced the pragmatist. I felt disappointed, but not destroyed. I knew I had done the right thing, and that it was not a failure. I had planted seeds in a very dry environment. It was not the right time, but that time would come.

 

BACK AT CHOICES, I looked into the eyes of the women I served and saw the faces of Russian women, their eyes questioning, hopeful. “How long will women have to wait?”

A conversation I'd had in the hotel leaped into my memory. Svetlana, a dark-eyed Russian journalist, had been writing a newspaper piece about my visit. We were discussing Stalin's
criminalization of abortion when she put down her pen and said quietly, “You know, there was some good in what Stalin did. If he had not criminalized abortion, I would not be here.”

My mind went to a television debate during which I had been asked, “What would you do if your mother aborted you?” It was the ultimate existential question, the one that plagued so many anti-choice activists, their empathy singularly focused, crushed between self-preservation and hypothetical non-existence.

But there was another hypothetical question to ask: What if Svetlana's mother had had an illegal abortion and perished in the process? That one did not cross her mind. She was giving voice to the assumption that the control of reproduction should be in the hands of the state. She could not see that the State viewed women and their bodies as commodities, property that each state appropriates for its own purpose. They are used as a means of production and a way for the state to exert control over its people.

The comparative history of abortion is actually the history of power relations between states and their female populations. The geopolitical and economic goals of any regime are heavily articulated in its population policy. When Stalin made abortion illegal, allowing Svetlana to be born was not the agenda; the agenda was to populate Russia with soldiers to counteract Hitler's rising militarism. Meanwhile, Aryan women in Nazi Germany who were thought to have aborted their fetuses could be punished with the death penalty, while those deemed “hereditarily ill” were permitted to have abortions.

The battlefields are different, but the war is always the same. For women in sexist, authoritarian societies, the issue of abortion can pose no questions of morality, ethics, or women's rights versus fetal life. There is only the harsh reality
that sex rarely comes without anxiety and that the price one often pays for it is high and dangerous.